FEATURE | STYLE
Written & illustrated by Cameron Mason McCurdy (she/her) | @leighapparently | Social Media Coordinator
Creating a brand is a difficult process. Some people spend years studying market trends, graphic design, and aesthetic cohesion, just to fail to portray a distinct identity. And then sometimes, by accident, you find yourself in costume as yourself and recognised for it. You find yourself tied to a look that you didn’t even realise you had made to be such an important part of your public perception that the moment you change it, you disappear. A ghost, unidentifiable in a crowd.
This is the story of a boy and a hat.
In 2013, I played Telltale’s The Walking Dead Game for the first time. The credits rolled, and I bawled my eyes out. I started reading the comics, started watching the show, and then, naturally, I started getting targeted ads on Facebook for a hat, Clementine’s hat – officially licensed game merchandise. I bought it instantly, and several weeks of international shipping later, it arrived. On my driveway in the dappled spring sunlight, I began my Sailor Moon transformation sequence. Neon lights shot from my body, the sound effects wooshed, and when the dust cleared, I was no longer Cameron - I was Hat Boy™.
I wore the Hat every day, to every gig I played, to every zinefest I tabled at, to every party I went to, in every music video I was in. For five years I was Hat Boy or Hat Guy to anyone I was publicly perceived by. I even embraced the moniker as it happened to me, changing my Instagram to @hatboymakesart.
Once when I was out of town, a friend went to a costume party wearing the Hat, and I was bombarded throughout the evening with angry messages from friends who kept thinking I was at the party and trying to talk to me, only to realise the Hat’s face was different.
Passing the Hat around at parties and gigs started to become the norm, I would find it on a friend’s head, a stranger’s head, or on the bathroom bench. We had an open relationship, but it would always find its way back to me.
I have no doubt that the Hat had become a comfort object. The Hat was easing my fear of being perceived, and my anxiety around socialising. It was a barrier between myself and the world. I didn’t have to be an autistic, ADHD trans person, struggling to cosplay as both ‘normal’ and ‘boy’. My job was just ‘Hat’.
One weekend, during drinks at my flat, one of my closest friends asked me, “Do you wear the hat during sex?”. I thought it was a joke, but when I said no, my friends were surprised. I started to resent the Hat that day.
As the band I was in found more success, I began to get recognised whenever I was in town, but never as myself, always as Hat Boy from Blu Fish. I told my flatmate about this, and he scoffed at me in disbelief. Two days later, we sculled Soju together in Myers Park before a gig, and the gang of youths next to us shouted “Yo, it’s Hat Guy!” It felt great proving him wrong, but me and the Hat were beginning to drift apart. I hated to be its Garfunkel, and hats are incapable of making Graceland.
Then one day, the Hat reached its limit. It had come pre-frayed, and the frays were winning the battle against the threads holding the thing together. It was grey now, instead of pure white, and no matter what I did, it was always a little bit damp. There’s truly nothing as destructive as the forehead grease of daily use and, by this point, hundreds of heads. So I did something unthinkable. I went back to Skybound’s website, and I replaced the Hat in secret. This new hat was exactly the same, except for The Walking Dead’s logo embroidered on the back, and I continued to be Hat Boy. But it wasn’t the same, people noticed the logo for one thing, but mostly, it just felt different. My love for the Hat wasn’t tied to its design, it was tied to that first hat itself, the object, my constant companion, my dearest friend.
I took off the Hat. Now I was just Boy™.
Instantly, acquaintances couldn’t comprehend me, I would go to Whammy Bar and Real Groovy and no one would know who I was.
“Oh! I didn’t recognise you without the hat”
“Where’s your hat?”
“Blu Fish? Nah that’s Hat Boy’s band, wait, what do you play?”
I heard that my friend's little sister was on the lookout for a good hat. So I gave both of the Walking Dead hats to my friend to pass on to her. She was honoured and a bit shocked.
“Are you sure?” She asked my friend, “But it’s like, the HAT though?”
Today I asked her about it. What had she thought about me and that hat, back when I was Hat Boy?
“What hat?” She asked, “You’re just Cam to me, you’re not defined by your hat…you’re defined by what you do with it”.
What I did with it was let it rest. It’s in a box somewhere, finally at peace.
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